Common Folk Using Common Sense

A violent storm system that ripped apart an Alabama high school as students hunkered inside later tore through Georgia, hitting a hospital and raising the death toll to at least 20 across the Midwest and Southeast. Eight students were killed when a tornado struck Enterprise High School, in a city of about 23,000 and 75 miles south of Montgomery, blowing out the walls and collapsing part of the roof, Mayor Kenneth Boswell said Friday. As the students scrambled for shelter, a section of roof and a wall near 17-year-old senior Erin Garcia collapsed on her classmates. “I was just sitting there praying the whole time,” Erin said. “It sounded like a bunch of people trying to beat the wall down. People didn’t know where to go. They were trying to lead us out of the building. “I kept seeing people with blood on their faces.”

The storm, which swept through Georgia Thursday night, killed six people in Baker County near the town of Newton, Fire Chief Andy Belinc said early Friday. A tornado apparently touched down near the Sumter Regional Hospital in Americus, 117 miles south of Atlanta, killing at least two people at or near the hospital, injuring an undetermined number of others and damaging the building, Weiss said.

A 55-year-old Powder Springs police officer driving south in the northbound lanes of I-75/85 died early Friday when his vehicle struck an ambulance head-on just south of Fulton Street. A female patient and two crew members inside the ambulance were injured. The ambulance from Clayton County was en route to Grady Memorial Hospital when the accident took place about 2:50 a.m. The wrong-way driver was identified as Billy Morgan, authorities said. Morgan was driving a Cadillac Escalade at the time of the wreck.

A charter bus carrying a college baseball team from Ohio plunged off a highway ramp in Atlanta early Friday and slammed into the southbound lanes of I-75 below. Six people — the driver, his wife, and four students — were killed and 29 others on the bus were injured. Three of the survivors underwent surgery and were listed in critical condition at Grady Memorial Hospital. The bus was carrying the team from Bluffton University. The school, 50 miles south of Toledo, has 1,150 students and is affiliated with the Mennonite Church USA. When the bus went up the HOV exit ramp, it went straight across Northside Drive, traveling over and leaving intact a two-and-a-half foot-tall-concrete barrier. It landed in the southbound lanes of the interstate, blocking all four lanes. Five fire trucks and at least three dozen firefighters were at the scene.